You are correct to my knowledge. I'm not a UI developer, but I would imagine that some are working on this.

In a better world, they would have been working on it for the last month – or longer, given how much work this last hardfork really needed. In this world not so much.

Since Beem has implemented methods to make the RC status near trivially visible, I expect that visibility to become extremely widespread in short order. Now, whether it will be interpretable easily in short order – that's a different issue.

I'm not sure I can easily interpret it at this point and I'm a long way from a casual layperson. Is this going to be something that we can easily expose to a new user who always has the choice of walking away and going to Twitter, Facebook, or even Medium if they want to get paid for their work? It'd be nice if someone had asked that question soon enough for user facing clients to come up with an answer.

It is a valid perspective. I am undecided on this and still evaluating it.

Your position really does hinge on a more fundamental question: Is it reasonable to charge people to access this platform if your intent is to get more people to access this platform?

From where I sit, you always get more of what you reward and you get less of what you punish. Charging people is a punishment. If you charge people to engage with your social network, you get less people. If you're in a situation where you are far away overwhelmed with more people than you can possibly service, you can afford to charge people to get in. If you're in a situation where you want people to come into your service, then you need to figure out a way to pay them in a direct and clear fashion. Not the promise of potential paying but gratification immediately of an order higher than what they are giving up to use your service.

If the message from Steem Inc. was "the rate at which we are getting new users is just too damn high, to the point where we cannot provide support to our developers and our digital applications folk are absolutely swamped with people, so we're going to start charging more to use the platform" – if that was the message and I believed it, I would accept that the RC system is a pretty good compromise on amortizing the costs across the user base.

But that is the opposite message from what we are being and have been told. We are being told that the developers want to aggressively grow the user base, that quality content as opposed to spam is something that everybody wants and we need to encourage.

So we're going to charge people for the opportunity to increase our stake in the platform with no guarantee to them?

That's what I hear compared to what I see.

From what I gather, I'm not the only one that hears and sees those things.

Maybe so, but to my reading this post didn't say that. It read as more balanced to me, expressing a desire to want to balance growth and usability with resource sustainability. Easier said than don't, to be clear.

I would counter that by saying if they didn't expect resource limitation to have beneficial side effects, why implement a system which is entirely about manifesting resource limitations? It's inherent to the action.

And let me be clear, in this case the resource I'm referring to is literally the RC and while I recognize that the resources more broadly being discussed as sustainable are network/storage/computation – those are not the problems of the user, those are the problem of the witnesses.

Which is another reason that the RC mechanic strikes me as wrongheaded. If the witnesses want more pay for providing the service they do then they need to talk to Steem Inc. about getting a larger slice of the reward pool or otherwise getting more funding. If this is really about the sustainability of maintaining the platform in that sense, then it makes little sense to put the onus on the people whose activity actually creates the value for the platform.

A system which focused on letting the witnesses set a price for servicing the transactions for the blockchain in a given time period would put its finger directly on that problem and solving it. But that's not what the RC system does.

Maybe the problem is mine for assuming that people implement systems which are designed to solve the problem they tell me they want to solve. That could be on me. But I don't think it is.

What they meant was that this could be accomplished by witnesses updating their software to 20.5 (from 20.4) and it did not require an immediate replay to have some corrective effect (but all witnesses did eventually perform a replay to avoid certain edge cases). This is distinct from witness parameters (such as the new account fee) which can be updated without a software update.

That's definitely not what I remember them saying, but it might be so.

The scattershot delivery is a long way from being reassuring.

What I'm saying is that the formulas adjust over a period of days to weeks, and we can see that rate at which they are adjusting. So large adjustments from here absent code changes or dramatic changes in usage appear not terribly likely.

It looks like we've dropped to about half the active posting this week compared to last week. Part of that is going to be because of the time that replays ate, part of that is going to be because of the general uncertainty – but given the historical account retention rate and the probable impact of new accounts being created without SP and there not currently being any vendors creating accounts with a basic supply of SP, I wouldn't expect content creation to go up anytime soon.

Dramatic changes in usage look like they are underway. How long before they become obvious… That's a different question altogether.

I'm curious how the new account creation system and largely increased costs are going to affect content creation over the next month. Last I checked, there was still some question about where witnesses were going to price account creation, but given that the initial staking of a new account to have enough RC to do anything meaningful on the blockchain is going to dwarf the price of creating the account in the first place, it may not matter much where that gets positioned as long as RC costs are notable.

I will not dispute that point at all. Generally speaking I agree with it.

I'll go further and say that I don't believe that they will go through all the trouble of getting the RC system installed and not use it. The only use for it is to limit interaction with the blockchain more aggressively than the old pure SP system, so that's what's going to happen. They seem to be clinically allergic to the idea of increasing the cost of doing financial transactions on the blockchain, and reasonably so if they intend one of the significant uses to be fintech and low fees and overheads are absolutely essential to being able to sell it in that role, so that heavy use has to be more focused on limiting user access to the social network side of things. They tip their hand when they refer to freemium offerings and this being a freemium blockchain at multiple times.

The only time you refer to something as freemium is when you expect people to be willing to pay for it. A game can be freemium because people are willing to pay for the experience, but the original videogame pioneers in that space have discovered that competition is fierce if one of your competitors simply appears to be free and of equal quality.

Twitter, Facebook, Minds, Gab – they all are essentially free for however much use you want to give them. Medium is attempting to play to the freemium model, but there are significant questions about their level of success and they have a far more established reputation as a provider of content people want to go to than the steem blockchain.

If the RC model is to be maintained, someone has to decide who is going to be charged for what – and that decision should have been made before the mechanic was implemented. If it was, that hasn't been communicated. If it hasn't been, that represents a massive failure.

And that's where we find ourselves, unpleasantly enough.

From my perspective, the basic mechanic is just wrong. It makes assumptions about human behavior and social network activity which are absolutely not borne out by observation. The side effects are not going to be positive, or rather it may be more accurate to say that the side effects are going to be to limit the small fry spammers and encourage the medium to large spammers to convert more of the resources that they are getting into SP to stay ahead of the curve. Bots already attempt to minimize their voting profile in order to maximize how much voting power and SP they can bring in exchange for people competing for the opportunity for the bot to spend VP to swing it's SP to support them. If anything, bots get advantaged in this environment. So small users with small footprints get disadvantaged, small spammers get disadvantaged, and bot swarms get a slight advantage. Even a cursory examination gives me a negative feeling.